Windows Media Player adds Onedrive folder even after I've removed it

Question

Windows 10 1709 and Windows Media Player 12. WMP is adding a Onedrive folder containing all my music. When I go through Organise -> Manage Libraries -> Music and remove the folder, it re-appears after the next reboot. The folder in Onedrive is not shared, and I have never added it to WMP. It's doing the same thing with Pictures, although that's not such an issue as I don't have too many of them. Any clues how to remove the Onedrive folder permanently?

Answer 1

You don't have to use 'Organise > Manage Libraries' to remove default search path for WMP in Windows 10 (or at least is not enough…). To remove OneDrive search path completely for WMP you have to do:

• open WMP
• right aside the Back-Forward blue buttons in the upper part, click on the small arrow ►, this will open another pop-up menu
• now navigate to Multimedia catalogue > Music (note icon) > Folder (folder icon)
• from this pane remove the default OneDrive folder and leave only your local user Music folder

and WMP shouldn't try to re-sync it every time after reboot.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, OneDrive automatically adds these folders to the Libraries whenever it starts up, and there doesn't seem to be any way to disable this behavior. There are however workarounds to address this, such as running a small program at startup that removes the OneDrive folders from Libraries again. See Emil Junker's post in this thread.

Another workaround suggested here is to modify the permissions of the internal .library-ms file so that OneDrive is blocked from modifying the library's location. But that's more advanced so I would recommend trying the first workaround first.